The longer I’m away from the reality of Kansas, the more I find myself susceptible to the mythology of the farm. I recently met someone who works for The Food Project, a non-profit that runs small gardens/farmlets on urban lots here in Boston. Somehow I’m surprised this exists here. I used to know people like this down in Georgia, crunchy heirloom-seed-hoarding grad school potheads, but it never occurred to me that this kind of work was feasible to do here in the New England tundra.
The author Jon Katz, who incidentally is not the same person as the comedian Jonathan (squigglevision) Katz, is a blantently responsibly party to my urban farm myth-making problem. His recurrent Slate series personifies the animals on his farm – a steer Elvis, donkey Jeannette, and barn cat Mother. He recently continued it with the story of his unusual chicken Henrietta. I’ve never owned non-boneless/skinless chicken, but this piece manipulating me into wanting to go build a fire escape coop. Possibly I could populate it with one of the refuge birds who got tossed onto the floor of the K-State / KU basketball games. They should have never taken away our oranges.
[...] will also tell if this urban farming experiment actually provides anything more useful or bountiful than what I can get in bulk at [...]